


A Summer Without Books

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-20
Updated: 2007-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:26:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1629053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She decided to take someone's advice for once in her life, to really take it and run.  It would not be a summer of books, it would be a summer of drawing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Summer Without Books

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sandoz

 

 

It was to be her first summer without books.

She'd brought some, of course. Carefully, reverently packed into cardboard boxes, stacked under boxes labeled Summer Clothes and Winter Clothes and Misc. Reassurances packaged like cough drops or cyanide pills, only to be brought out under the direst of circumstances.

Because this was going to be a summer without books, without endless strings of quotations that did little but remind her that while she'd read tomes thick and thin, she'd never really understood one of them. Not even after experiencing Life Changing Experiences, the kind that were supposed to (and did, it turned out) Forever Alter One's Perception of the World.

Blue thought that, after Death and Desertion and Growing Up, all those books didn't start meaning more. Actually, and terrifyingly, they started to mean less. Someone else's pitiable attempt to encompass their entire life into the ideograms of alphabets and punctuation.

She decided to take someone's advice for once in her life, to really take it and run. It would not be a summer of books, it would be a summer of drawing.

She kept a satchel tucked carefully behind the driver's seat. In it, she kept the necessities of this summer: a wallet containing her hard-won driver's license, an extra car key, a jewelry box with the remains of a few small butterflies, a box of condoms, a carefully annotated road map, a thick drawing pad, a metal box of drawing pencils, a small wooden box of pastel crayons.

Not that she wanted to be an artist, but she hadn't yet come to the point in her life where she wanted to be an author. She knew that it was inevitable, that one day she would feel compelled beyond all reason to put pen to paper and produce something, as vapid and pointless as it might be. But for right now, she wanted to hold those words at bay, keep them for something less important (maybe) or less difficult (maybe). Keep them for something else, at least, like a bottle of champagne kept corked and chilled, patiently awaiting some Special Occasion that might never actually happen.

Zach was patient with her, with her fumbling for the right colored pastel and her fumbling for the right way to tell the story of each drawing. Not so long later (Blue doesn't know this yet, of course), she would write the Very Long Story of what had happened to her and to Hannah and to the Bluebloods and to her father. For now, in any case, what she wanted to tell were the small stories, the ones she knew would never make it into any Very Important Autobiography she might pen.

Perched on an embankment overlooking Sliding Rock, she drew a picture of her mother. All hair and bright eyes and butterflies floating down across her arms and her legs and her shoes. The proportions were not quite right, nose crooked and ears flat and collarbones buckling under thinnish skin.

But Blue liked the feeling of the pastels smearing under her fingers, the shade achieved by mixing the palest green and the palest blue, how it was the exact shade of a dress her mother may once have worn (if Blue's recollection hadn't failed her, though it probably had).

Zach sat next to her, reading a helpful brochure (provided by the National Park Service) with the kind of intensity usually reserved for monks inking calligraphy into the margins of specially commissioned Bibles.

"My mother loved butterflies," Blue said. She put the last pencil back in its box. From his pocket, Zach took out a cloth handkerchief, the kind your crazy grandfather usually carries, and began, gently, to rub the oil and graphite from her hands. He glanced at the picture like he wasn't sure he was allowed. She nudged the pad up with her knees so he could see better and he smiled.

"I wouldn't have guessed." He was still rubbing her fingertips and palms. He said, "It's a good portrait. I mean, it looks like a nice portrait. I've never met her or anything."

Blue blinked, then looked over to Sliding Rock. She thought about friction and gravity and balance. She said, "She's dead."

"Oh," Zach said. He didn't say he was sorry and she was glad he didn't. From the first time someone had said it, she had been sick of hearing it.

"She had an accident. Or, or maybe killed herself," Blue said. It was the first time in her life she had said it, and maybe it was the first time she really knew what it was like to tell something you knew to be the truth when the person you told might actually believe you. She had told Dad lots of things in her life, but there were very few things he didn't already know and even fewer that he would believe, if he didn't already.

"My mom likes to play canasta," Zach said. He carefully folded up the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket like a special souvenir.

"My Dad said that people who play canas--" Blue scrunched up her forehead like crumpling notebook paper. She thought that maybe there would be a time in her life when she couldn't rely on Dadisms to make her points for her, that there might in fact be a time when she wouldn't be able to rely on his ghost to provide her with her thoughts. "I've never played before," she said, instead.

"Me, neither," Zach said. At the corner of his mouth, there was a smile contemplating escape like a tiger silently considering weaknesses in the bars the zoo had put up around it. "I was just kidding. My mom wouldn't know a game of canasta from a can of cream of mushroom."

Blue laughed for maybe the first time since Hannah. (Her life was now divided, Blue discovered, by the demarcation of Hannah Schneider: before Hannah, after Hannah, and the most complicated of all, During Hannah. She wondered, sometimes, if this dividing line would persist, if this would become the Julian calendar of her life.) Her throat opened, her lungs opened. Her laughter echoed off a far rock wall.

Zach said, "Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week," and Blue kissed him square on the mouth.

Days later, they were at Monticello. Blue had been there before, but never on a day so sweet, with a sky so clear it might have been a thoroughly erased white board. It was hot. They sat on a bench together.

Her drawing pad was growing heavy with pictures. She had (poorly) drawn a too orange sunset and attempted to capture the hop-step of a cardinal prancing along the windowsill at the Holiday Inn of Somewhere, Virginia.

This time, the drawing was of her father. Something about the towering statue of Jefferson in the rotunda had made her think of him, of his slender, unpresidential limbs and of his favorite hat. She drew him with quick, penciled strokes, no color at all. She drew him surrounded by books, spines blank. Even though she could easily have filled in the title of every book in his ever-traveling library, she didn't. It was a summer of no books, and she thought that might be considered cheating, if this were a game with rules.

She drew him in a bourbon mood, eyelids dark.

It was too quiet, so she said, "My dad's a professor. Political science. And he's writing a book."

"About what?" Zach asked, without looking up from the book he'd bought at the gift shop, the one about the history of the two-dollar bill.

"About, well," Blue started. "You know, I don't think he's really writing a book. I think he's just carrying around a legal pad and trying to make himself feel better."

Zach looked up and considered Blue's knee, the picture she'd drawn of Gareth and his unnamed books. It didn't take Freud to make the oh-so-subtle connection, and Zach was kind enough not to say anything.

He put his arm around her shoulder. "That's what people do," he said slowly. "It's, it's hard to give up your failures, you know? To let them float away so you don't have to be anchored to them anymore."

He turned toward her with a Tower of Pisa smile. "I'm planning on majoring in Stupid Metaphors."

"Summa cum laude, here you come," Blue said. She leaned her head against his shoulder and let her hands go limp. She thought about the picture, about her suitcase-rumpled father and his disappearing rabbit trick.

"He left," she said. Her voice was the whisper of fingers through sand. "He left me alone." Somehow, the After Hannah period, that epoch-long time since that night on Sugartop Summit, had been defined entirely by just that: the after-Hannahness of it. That her father had abandoned her, that he had orphaned her, that he had turned her into just the kind of sob story Hannah fed Blue about the Bluebloods - somehow, all that paled in comparison.

"And I didn't tell anybody. Foster care sounds super scary." Blue used humor like chain mail. She laughed weakly at her own joke, but Zach didn't laugh. He didn't do anything. He didn't move or speak. He just sat there, letting the sun set and the breeze blow and the humidity of the day drip down through their hair.

The sun had smudged the sky purple by the time he finally said, "Not every family has deep roots, you know? Sometimes, um, sometimes maybe you can be the seed and not a branch."

It didn't sound as eloquent aloud as it does written down. He stumbled over his own words and the wind took away some of the sibilants. But then again, that's what that summer was about. Coming untethered from all the words, trying to concentrate on the pictures and the feelings and the sounds, even if they're not the kind that will last, forever entombed in the kind of book nobody will ever read.

"Yeah," she said. "Maybe."

They wound their way up the coast. It took more than a month. They stopped at the kind of places Gareth never would have let them stop when she was a kid, at roadside Italian Ice stands, at towns with unbelievable names and sleepy little diners, at the Washington Monument and Coney Island.

And she kept drawing. She drew a handful of sand filled with tiny sand crabs. She drew the columns of the Lincoln Memorial surrounded by a throng of Japanese tourists. She drew a picture of a lonely, abandoned chemical plant somewhere in New Jersey, and of the fearless rabbit who skittered across the empty parking lot.

She drew Zach when he slept, the pencil in her hand slipping across the paper in the dark so that the next morning when the sun came up, none of the lines connected. But somehow, even still, there was the shape of his nose and the shadow of his unshaven jaw and the curl of his fingers around the worn hotel blanket.

When she woke up, he was looking at it. Standing there in his boxers, a tiny box of orange juice in one hand and her drawing pad in the other. She didn't move so he wouldn't know she was awake. He wasn't exactly crying, but his bony shoulders were shaking so that the birthmark above his right shoulder bounced up and down.

She didn't tell him she'd seen.

It was raining when she brought him to the airport. It was the third of August and the wet heat of Boston crept under Blue's shirt and between her hand and his. He was flying back to start at Duke and she was determined not to let even a single I Love You slip.

They got there far too early, so they sat on the sidewalk outside the airport together. She couldn't talk, for the lump in her throat, so she pulled out her pad and her pencils and her pastels and started drawing. She didn't think about him, about his hand around her shoulder, about the way time was running out.

She tried to think about perspective and shading instead, biting her lip and sitting very still except for her hands.

There were lots of things she could've drawn, that Last Day of Childhood (a new kind of demarcation, and one far less morbid). She could've drawn the airplanes or the surly security guard who watched them warily for sudden movements or the grimy taxicabs that came and went with the regularity of a pendulum. She could've drawn Hannah or Jade or St. Gallway's.

She didn't, of course. It was a summer without books, but it wasn't a summer without poetry.

So she drew herself. A self-portrait from that last day, one (probably futile) attempt to take that day, to wrap it up and condense it, to hold it in her hand and love it for just a single moment. To know that, as far as she went from this moment and this place, somewhere out there was some kind of memorial to the fact that a Girl once sat with a Boy outside an airport.

She carefully detached it from the pad, then turned to Zach and presented it with an awkward flourish. "So we don't forget," she said.

"Forget what?" he asked. He took the picture, though, and slid it between the pages of a magazine to keep it from getting smudged.

"Forget that--" Blue started, but then found herself looking away instead of answering. She wanted to sum up everything, wanted to create something pithy and perfect that she could give him, that he could slide between the slick pages of the magazine, that he could keep warm and safe in his closed palm.

She could have spent a hundred, a thousand pages explaining it to him, telling him everything she didn't want to forget. (Funnily enough, she soon would do just that. But this is a past-tense story and Blue doesn't know how it will turn out.)

But she didn't want to. She shook her head, pulled his hand into her lap and held it there. She finally said, "Don't worry. Let's just, let's just sit here, okay? For a few more minutes." Before things change again, Blue thought. Before there was another dividing line that she was On The Other Side Of. Before the new regrets and the new heartaches.

Before the Rest of Life hit her like a moving train.

Zach just smiled and said, "Yeah, okay. Let's just sit here."

And so they did.

 

 

 


End file.
